Podium: No literary apartheid in Bosnia

Delivered by the author at the launch of his anthology, `Scar on the Stone: Contemporary Poetry from Bosnia'

COMPARED TO Serbian or Hungarian or Greek poetry, surprisingly little Bosnian poetry has been translated into English. What has is almost universally weak, both technically and artistically.

It is abundantly clear why this was, and is, so. There appears to be a view widespread in the former Yugoslavia that non-native speakers can easily handle journalistic or literary translation into English. But this reflects a serious misconception. It is exceptionally rare to find a translator who can produce work of real literary or even technical quality in a language that is not his or her own.

After all, it is hard enough to produce work of literary quality even in one's native language. Always a bad policy in prose, translation by non-native speakers in the matter of poetry is wholly misguided since it is nearly always tone-deaf to sophisticated registers of usage, style, atmosphere and meaning.

Translation is an important window on to a country. It shapes the understanding and image of that country. Unfortunately, both the dearth and weakness of previous translations of Bosnian literature can only tend to confirm the worst Western stereotypes - that it is some sort of Balkanized Ruritania where three tribes with unpronounceable names do unspeakable things; that it lacks a serious unified culture within ancient borders as old as those of Western nations; that it might as well be partitioned de facto between the cultures of its better-known neighbours.

In contrast, my anthology rows against those stereotypes; since English is the global lingua franca, it opens a large window on the rich and sophisticated poetic tradition of a long-standing people. The outstanding quality of the translations implicitly demands that Bosnian poetry be taken as seriously as the poetry of any other European nation.

Now I will step briefly into the lion's den. A debate is going on in Bosnia as to whether, basically, there should be one or three Bosnian literatures - this latter option based, presumably, on the linguistic differences between the Bosniak, Serbian and Croatian versions of the language, rather than a crude ethno-religious classification. I am speaking, of course, of a debate within liberated Bosnia.

It is surely understandable that what was once formally called "Serbo- Croat" should be renamed more naturally as Bosnian, Croatian or Serbian. It is also right that every effort should be made within free Bosnia to ensure the equality and systemisation of each of these dialects. But when these justified linguistic considerations begin to intrude into literature, I think we are into dangerous territory. We are into the same obsession with labels that first descended to ethnic-cleansing and then led to the catastrophic Western map-making of successive peace negotiations.

Any critical move towards the idea of three literatures is deeply retrograde. It would mark a partition on ethno-religious grounds. Is that what people in free Bosnia really want after the years of genocide and suffering - to finish the work of the ethnic separatists, to institute a literary apartheid?

There is an alternative that is also opportunity. It involves what might be called a civic state as opposed to an ethnic nationalism. All citizens are equal, both politically and culturally. Just as Irish culture is simply what happens culturally on the island of Ireland - including, of course, the contributions of outsiders - Bosnian culture is simply what happens culturally within the historic boundaries of Bosnia.

Actually, isn't there something artistically simple-minded about the idea that linguistic difference must equate to imaginative or cultural difference - that literature, so fond of holding disparate things in creative unity, should be packaged with new labels according to some different words and pronunciations? Isn't the poetic imagination more likely to thrive on cross-fertilizations within a single tradition than on the partitioning of that tradition?

In this inclusive light, diversity is not sidetracked by what Freud called "the narcissism of small difference"; it liberates rather than Balkanizes. Historic Bosnia is, in fact, unique in Europe for being a nation without a majority - a nation of minorities. As has often been remarked, this is why it is like a polyphony. And a polyphony ceases to be itself if one of the strands is left out, or if the strands are unravelled into something else. As I understood it, the defence of Bosnia was about the defence of polyphony; as I see it, that polyphony in its literary form is best defended by a single Bosnian literature.